Chapter Eleven

The next day should have been my day off, as near as I could calculate with our weird shift patterns. I’d been looking forward to a lie-in and some therapeutic window-shopping, but after the events of the previous couple of days, and given the number of Otherworlders still wafting around our streets like unwanted relatives at a wedding, we’d decided it was better to keep the office staffed. But, because we were never, in any possible version of the universe, going to get overtime, we worked pretty much in spirit, rather than body.

At one o’clock I left Liam reading his latest Doctor Who magazine and headed out of the office in search of lunch. Almost immediately Malfaire was beside me. I might have suspected him of lying in wait, if I hadn’t had the world’s tiniest ego, and most of that had seeped out after the last few years of romantic disappointment.

‘May I take you to lunch, Jessica?’

Okay, he was strange, okay, I didn’t fancy him, but he was polite, he didn’t seem to be dangerous and he was offering me free food. We went to a bistro in the shadow of the Minster, where we looked at each other over long glasses of ice and a drink called virgin’s blood that I really hoped was nothing more than tomato juice and vodka. He was wearing sunglasses pushed high against his face so that no trace of his eyes showed and his hair was carefully dishevelled. The overall effect was that of a designer hangover.

‘So,’ he began when the waiter had taken our order. ‘Tell me about yourself, Jessica. Are you from York?’

It was an unexpected question. I’d been expecting something more sexually pointed and I’d been bracing myself to beat him off with the cutlery. ‘I was born in Devon, but my parents moved to York when I was only a few weeks old. Apparently things were really bad in the South during the Troubles.’

‘They were indeed. Whereabouts in Devon? I knew the area quite well, once upon a time.’

‘Exeter.’

‘Ah. Lovely city.’

I took a sip of my drink and my eyes watered. ‘Back then you could only get Residency Rights in York if you were local, what with it being a Safe Area. We were lucky, my dad is from here originally and he managed to wangle it so that we could move to the city, then he and my mum got jobs teaching at local schools. My sister was at a Protected boarding school in the Midlands, and they reckoned they could visit her just as well from here as from Devon, so, here I am.’

Malfaire looked amused. ‘You have a sister? What’s she like?’

‘Oh, Abbie? She’s nothing like me for a start. She’s very sensible.’

He raised his eyebrows above the rims of his sunglasses. ‘Does that mean that you aren’t sensible, Jessica?’ His arms came forward across the table, and he leaned on them.

‘No, I’m sensible, too. Very sensible. Positively prudent.’ I moved myself and my glass further back.

The waiter brought our plates of seafood and buttered pasta and Malfaire watched me the whole time it was being fussily arranged on the table. I found myself finishing my drink, to give my fingers something to do. ‘Now, tell me more about yourself, about growing up. What sort of a child were you? Because I have to say,’ he lowered his voice a little bit, but not enough, and the waiter smirked, ‘that I find you a most fascinating adult.’

In my back pocket my mobile vibrated. ‘Hi, Liam, what’s up?’

‘Wow, is that relief in your voice? What are you up to … please tell me it doesn’t involve the words “bail” “breaking” and “injunction”? Anyway, look, this is important … Daim’s dead.’

‘What?’ I swivelled around in my chair so that I no longer faced Malfaire, but he craned forward as though trying to listen in to my call.

There was a furtive rummaging around at the other end of the phone, from which I surmised that Liam had been fiddling with the new electric pencil sharpener. ‘He was killed, about an hour ago. They’ve got the guy who did it, but Sil wants you. He’s not convinced it’s quite as straightforward as it looks.’

I caught Malfaire’s eye. He mouthed ‘problem?’ at me, around a prawn he was sucking in a most lascivious way. I shook my head. ‘What about Tez? Did he get out?’

‘Daim’s demon? I dunno; you’ll have to ask Sil. He’s down there now, wants you to get over the river ASAP.’

‘But I’m –’

‘Sil, Jessie, not me. You know what he’s like, and he sounded a bit uptight when he rang in.’

Tez had warned me about danger, and now Daim was dead? My meal no longer looked delicious; it became pellets of greasy gunk in a slimy sauce, as my appetite retreated. Daim was a kid, a stupid, mixed-up kid without much of a life, and then he’d become a vampire without any notable change of circumstance. I owed him.

‘But what about Enforcement?’

Daim came from over the river to the South, which meant that his Enforcement team should have been led by Laurie Denham, he of the shaky hands and even shakier grasp of concepts. Sil being involved in something that ought to have been an open-and-shut case for the mop-and-bucket brigade was worrying.

‘Laurie’s pie-eyed drunk as usual. Natalie Andrews has gone over to fill in, but Sil wants you there, too. Reckon he thinks it’s got something to do with the Run business. Probably wants you to investigate.’

‘Oh, great. So now the city vamp has got me down as York’s answer to Miss bloody Marple, has he? That’s great, I’ll be lucky to get an uninterrupted lunch break before Christmas now!’

‘No-one would ever mistake you for Miss Marple, Jessie. Poirot possibly, given the incipient moustache … Now, do you want the address or not, only I’ve got to get on with this filing.’

‘Suppose.’ I took down the dictated address and hung up, to see Malfaire still smiling at me.

‘Well, off you go and clear up your mystery. I wouldn’t want to be the man responsible for keeping you when your Master has called.’ This was said in a slightly derisory tone.

I stood rather awkwardly, not sure how to take my leave. Malfaire sorted it for me by standing and giving me a cool, continental double-kiss. ‘We must do this again,’ he said, ‘only without the sudden death element.’

I looked at him across the table doing shabby rock-god for all he was worth, and wondered again at the lack of sex appeal. Given his appearance, I should have been a little puddle of liquid by now … instead, all I could do was criticise his eyes as being a bit too golden and his hair as over-dramatic. Maybe my sex drive had driven off.

Looking over my shoulder as I left, I saw that Malfaire was smiling broadly into his drink, almost laughing. I hadn’t been that amusing, had I?

I hailed a taxi and managed the cross-city journey in less than half-an-hour, wondering all the while about what could have happened to Daim. ‘They’ve got the person who did it,’ Liam had said, so he’d been killed. Not, as I might have expected, managed to damage himself spectacularly by, say, trying to microwave his head or see if vampires really could fly … Had it been an accident? I knew vampires were hard to kill unless you really, really meant it – it was unlikely that someone had slipped whilst holding a sharp knife or anything.

All in all, I was feeling pretty shaken when I hauled myself up the five flights of stairs to the flat in which Daim Willis had had his last brief encounter.

I was surprised to find, on entering the flat, a certain lack of the paraphernalia of a fight. The front door was intact, the fixtures and fittings were still fitted and fixed, and only the presence of a spreading pool of blood gave away the fact that something untoward had happened there.

Daim’s body was crumpled on the floor in a kitchen which smelled of old chips and more recent sausages, the plain pine stake jutting from his spine as though he’d been nailed into place. He was cold and there was no sign that his demon had escaped. I felt my heart give a little twitch; he may not have been a friend, but it seemed ridiculous that he had ended in a sticky mess, disregarded.

‘Tez?’ I whispered, but there was no reply, no movement.

‘He has gone, Jessie.’

I swivelled and found Zan standing behind me. ‘What happened?’

Zan looked around the flat. It obviously fell way below his standards, but then I think Buckingham Palace lacked that certain something as far as Zan was concerned. ‘I am unsure. That is why we need you.’

‘I don’t know what use I can be.’ A boy was brought into the kitchen, escorted by Sil, who looked about as pleased to see me as the corpse did. ‘Why did you ask me to come over?’

‘This is the killer. Human.’ Sil pushed and, being vampire, he didn’t have to push too hard before the boy was physically shunted in front of me.

I glanced him over. ‘Yes.’ The lad looked frozen, scared, certainly not as cocky as I would have expected from someone who’d just killed himself a vampire. He wasn’t wearing any of the badges which would affiliate him to an anti-vamp organisation and he didn’t look hard enough to be a chancy free-agent. In fact he seemed rather baffled as to why he was there at all. ‘And he’s terrified of you.’

‘So. Maybe he will talk to you.’

Natalie Andrews came in from the living room and greeted me, warmly enough when you consider that this was, technically, her patch. Although not up to her to actually do anything, this being an Otherworld matter and therefore under Sil’s jurisdiction, it was her job as Enforcement for this bit of York to oversee proceedings.

‘Why can’t Nat talk to him?’

‘I already have.’ Natalie flicked a look at Sil. ‘He doesn’t know anything, or he says he doesn’t know anything. Yet he was found in here, standing over Daim. That has to put him in the knowing something category.’ She shook her long, dark-red hair back over her shoulders, for Sil’s benefit.

‘And I cannot read anything from him. I think magic may be involved but …’ Sil shrugged. Apart from the ability to control minds, vampires have less magic than the average chat-show host.

‘What’s your name?’ I turned to the boy, who’d acquired a certain defiance from being talked about in his presence.

‘Mike.’ Surly, but at least he’d answered.

‘So, Mike – you’re, what? A friend of Daim’s from … before?’

‘Yeah.’ A trace of uncertainty.

There was something about the boy, something about the flicker in his eyes. They were an unusual pale-hazel colour, the most attractive thing about him, and as I stared deep, deep into them, something stared back. A whiteness passed over the pupils, as though for one second Mike had been struck blind. I turned to Sil. ‘He’s been glamoured. Some bastard’s put him under an enchantment.’

‘Are you sure?’

I turned back to Mike. That something was still there, inside his head. Fading now, melting like a cloud into the air. ‘Yes. And whoever did it is very, very confident that this lad won’t remember anything that could give them away.’ I looked down at Daim, spread out on the grubby lino floor. ‘Where’d you get the stake?’

Mike blinked at me. ‘Wha’?’

‘The stake. Where did you get it? Did you buy it, or were you given it, or –?’

‘It were here.’ The boy gave his head a little shake, as though to dislodge a troublesome memory. ‘It were already here. I found it there, on table.’

Sil’s face was momentarily occupied by an expression I couldn’t read. ‘You are saying that you came into a vampire’s flat, and there happened to be a stake on the table?’

Mike nearly wet himself at being directly addressed. ‘Errr, yeah. Sir.’

‘Sil, it’s not his fault. One of your lot has glamoured him so thoroughly that he wouldn’t have known if he was in Canterbury Cathedral knifing David Beckham. You’ve got to let him go.’

‘One of my lot?’

‘You know what I mean. An Otherworlder.’

Sil walked around Mike, peering into his face like someone looking through the windows of an empty house. He let his fangs show a touch and Mike whimpered. ‘Someone would do this? Glamour a human to kill another vampire? But why? Why not ride in and do the job himself?’

‘That’s up to you to find out, isn’t it? You’re in charge of Otherworld Affairs in this city. But bear in mind this guy’s not really a killer, he’s been got at by someone … by one of yours, Sil. Just like …’ I gulped at the coincidence, ‘Harry and Eleanor. I’m beginning to think –’ I tailed off. Enforcement were still investigating; it was none of Sil’s business. ‘It’s a bit like blaming a gun for a shooting.’

Sil glanced at Natalie, looked away and then looked back. They made big-time eye-contact and I saw the flare of interest in his eyes. He was a sucker for a flicky-haired girl. It would all end in tears, of course; trouble was, they wouldn’t be his. I curled my nails into my palms and wondered why I was so angry about the prospect.

‘But who on earth would want Daim Willis dead?’ Natalie pulled herself away from Sil’s dubious, if undoubted, attractions for a second. ‘Want him dead enough to go to the trouble of glamouring one of his friends into doing it, rather than waiting for him to fall off a bridge or something?’

‘Jessica? You knew him, who would want him dead?’

I looked once more at the body on the floor. In death Daim was even more pathetic than in life; he resembled a bunch of old clothes with a face on. And not even a very prepossessing face, at that. I found that I was shaking. ‘I think it might have been because of me.’

Sil rolled his eyes. ‘Everything still has to be about you, doesn’t it, Jessie?’

‘No, listen. Tez warned me about some kind of danger he thought I was in, which does, incidentally, seem to be the case, should anyone actually be interested, so, I think, Tez had been picking up information he wasn’t supposed to have.’

Zan was looking from Sil to me. ‘But,’ he said slowly, ‘who would arrange this to stop a demon from informing a human? You humans, you’re just –’ He tailed off.

‘Lesser meat? Oh, don’t worry Zan, I’m well aware of what you think of us. Anyway I don’t think it was prevention, I think it was punishment.’

Sil snorted. ‘Very Mafioso,’ he snapped. ‘And what has suddenly made you so important?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, genuine terror tiptoeing up and down my spine. ‘I really don’t. But first Enforcement go crackers on me, then there’s the Run business, and now Daim’s dead …’

Natalie was looking Sil up and down and he was pretending not to notice. I guess some women like that whole man-in-charge thing, even if the man in question is five foot ten, skinny as a heron and – well, not really a man. I hated myself for the burst of jealousy that fired off inside me so strongly that if I’d had a demon it would have been lying down and fanning itself. I mean, come on. Sil? Wouldn’t touch him if he’d been made of chocolate. I needed a bloke, that was all. It had been too long.

‘So, can we let Mike go?’

Sil stared out of the window. I think it was to give Natalie a chance to check out his back view and she certainly made the most of it. He’d obviously come from a meeting of some kind because he was wearing a beautifully tailored suit, slightly out of date, but that’s what you get with vampires, they have a made-to-measure suit and they keep wearing it, century after century. It had taken me months of pointed comments to get Zan out of frock coats. ‘But that will send the wrong message. It’ll look as though I turned a blind eye.’

‘Well, can’t you, I dunno, scare him up a bit? Give him a bit of the old vamp power thing.’

Sil closed his eyes. ‘What the hell do you think this is, an episode of Scooby Doo?’

I looked over to where Zan was leaning against the wall, playing with one of his interminable devices. He really was Liam’s vampire twin. ‘Zan? Any suggestions?’

Zan fiddled with the tiny palm top for a bit longer. ‘Take his mind?’

Sil straightened. ‘Obtain power over him? To what end?’

‘Tell him to forget the glamour.’ The two vampires locked eyes. ‘It can be done,’ Zan went on, ‘if your mind is strong enough to supersede the hex. You will not remove it; merely force it to be ignored.’

I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but Sil had. ‘So.’ He walked around Mike again and Mike cringed. ‘You think I can force him to remember who glamoured him?’ He smiled and Natalie gave a little moan. I wondered what she’d do if she saw one of his special smiles, when he genuinely found something amusing. They were better than an erotic novelist’s entire output. But don’t quote me on that.

‘Perhaps not.’ Zan gave an alien shrug. ‘But worth a try.’

‘I haven’t done this in a long time.’ Sil shot Natalie a quick look. He was turning her on, and that was exciting his demon, which was ratcheting up the tension and locking the pair of them in a self-feeding loop. Oh, I knew how it worked all right. I bet he was loving it. ‘Here we go.’

Grey eyes darkened. His pupils seemed to bleed out, the grey shrinking further and further under the darkness, and then further out, beyond the iris and into the pale whites, until the whole eye was a black, mirrorlike surface. ‘Mike. Look at me.’

Mike was a mass of fear. Sil’s voice added to that fear and I watched with a measure of pity as a large damp stain spread across the front of his jeans.

‘Look. At. Me.’

I had to fight my own feet from turning me round, the voice was that compelling. Natalie took two steps towards Sil and I put my hand on her arm to stop her from walking right into the vampire glamour. And glamour was the right word for it. Sil looked amazing. The huge, dark pits that his eyes had become made his skin look translucently pale, and his hair look like slashes into midnight where its blackness trailed across his face. His perfect bone structure stood out like a porcelain mask and he looked taller, more alien than ever before. Something inside me squeezed painfully.

‘I can’t …’ Natalie moved another step closer.

‘Don’t look at the eyes,’ I said, keeping my voice low so as not to break the hold Sil had on Mike. ‘Try the groin,’ I added, rather tightly. ‘It seems to be distracting you already.’ She gave me a sharp look which I returned with extra edges. ‘You’re welcome to him, believe me, just don’t start choosing curtains. He’s typical vamp, all about the novelty.’

After a few seconds of mental lock-down, Sil released his hold and Mike crumpled to the floor, sprawling on Daim’s less-than-savoury floor covering with his face in something that looked like the remnants of a pasty. ‘He’ll remember killing,’ Sil said, his voice sounding rather far away. ‘I thought that was punishment enough, to remember killing your best friend.’

‘But you couldn’t tell who glamoured him first time round?’

‘No. I couldn’t take him back that far. There’s a block in there, something that cut out whenever I got close to the memory.’ Sil shook his head as though clearing a thought. ‘Something that could stop me getting deep into his head. Into a human’s head.’

Forgetting Natalie, forgetting Zan, we stared at each other for a moment. ‘Something powerful,’ I whispered.

‘Really powerful.’

‘But then, you’re not exactly Mister Alpha Vampire, are you? I mean, couldn’t someone higher up the chain break through it?’

‘Hey, you do know I run this city, right?’

‘Well, yeah, but it’s not like you’re all thews and biceps, is it? You’re more the cerebral type.’

‘Was that a compliment?’

I looked him up and down. ‘No.’

‘It wasn’t another vampire, Jessie.’ Sil came in close. I was uncomfortably reminded of those last days in the office. ‘It’s something else.’

‘What, then? I thought, apart from your lot and the weres and the zombies … that was it for the human-based component. And I can’t imagine a vampire, even one with Daim’s lack of attributes, letting anything else get close enough to glamour him.’

‘Neither can I.’ We were nearly nose to nose now. I could feel the static from his hair pulling at my skin. There was a huge chasm of ache inside me, regret, loss, grief, and I nearly fell into it when he reached out a hand and touched my wrist. ‘Something is very, very wrong.’

Zan’s voice brought me down. ‘Can I suggest that we leave Mike to come round in his own time and go and complete all the necessary paperwork back at the office? I need to charge the Blackberry.’

The spell holding me to Sil broke completely when I saw him move towards Natalie. ‘Yeah, good idea. Get the bod-squad in, deal with the mortal remains, then send someone to check that the boy is okay, will you?’

Zan typed the notes.

‘You softie,’ I said.

‘Yeah? You were the one who wanted to let him go. I’m letting him go.’

‘Knowing what he did.’

‘Should make sure he never does it again then, shouldn’t it? Nothing like the memory of death to …’ He stopped suddenly.

‘Sil?’

No response.

Natalie looked from Sil to me. ‘Do you two do this all the time?’ she asked.

‘Pretty much.’ Sil leaned closer to her. ‘We have a kind of hate-hate relationship.’

‘We don’t have any kind of relationship,’ I said, and marched out of the flat.

The music was loud, the lights garish and the dancers as desperate as they always were. If he weren’t so fucked-up right now he’d feel sorry for them, for their oh-so-transparent ploys and desires, their pathetically human mindsets. But not tonight. Tonight even the interlude he’d enjoyed with Natalie hadn’t been enough to wipe the memory of Jess’s expression from his mind, even sex hadn’t helped him to lose himself enough. He needed more to rid himself of the thought of those flame-coloured eyes scorching his, the weight of loathing in her voice as she’d dismissed any thought of him. Needed to forget …

The beat thrummed. Want. Crave. Choose carefully, choose one who knows what you’re asking. Who wants what you offer. You don’t want even a hint of coercion.

Sil circled, feeling the power and the grace that the demon lent flowing through him, muscle and bone. He found it increasingly hard to remember those days of humanity before this wondrous new vitality gripped him; all that came to mind when he tried was an overbearing sadness. But one of the most incredible things about carrying this demon was that he never had to recollect those times. Never had to live on ‘befores’ or ‘yesterdays’ because ‘now’ swept all in front of it. ‘Now’ was all that mattered. Carpe diem might have been composed for vampires – the day was theirs to seize. A girl slithered past him, all silk and lace and scent of willingness, and he turned to watch her pass, watching her watch him as he did so.

He had a sudden, unwanted, image of Jessica as he’d once caught her, trying on a dress in the office. Horrible, mismatched underwear and cartoon-covered socks, yet so, so desirable, even when her cold fury and hot embarrassment met to floor him in the resultant snowstorm of insults. Hell. Here I am, surrounded by eager women and I’m still thinking about Jessica. Who doesn’t want me. What am I, some kind of masochist? Am I getting off on wanting a woman who must be about the only female on the planet who doesn’t fall for the vampire image? What is wrong with me?

And there she was. A tall girl, all dressed in black, one of the vampire groupies. Not ideal; he would have preferred someone a little more innocent but hey, beggars and choosers and all that.

‘Not seen you in here before.’ She leaned up against him at the bar. ‘You new?’

Sil laughed. ‘Oh no. Far, far from it, in fact. Old as they come.’

‘Then you don’t come here often.’

The laughter died. ‘No. Shall we … dance?’

And as she cruised in his arms and he sated the other hunger, he closed his eyes and wondered what Jessie would say if she could see him now, what she would say if she knew about the emptiness that still lay in that corner of his heart. Felt her presence with another tug along that invisible wire that bound them, and wished he knew what the hell to do about it.